The cattle huddle in vast pens, pressed fast against one another, thousands to the acre, fed anti-biotics and cow blood, expelling fifty pounds of solid and liquid waste a day into local waterways, until the grim moment arrives and they are led, one by one, up the wooden gangplank and onto the kill floor. Workers there stand by to fire metal bolts into the base of the cow’s neck. The animal writhes through its death throes on the grated floor before being lifted by its haunches and suspended on a conveyor line, where its head is removed, its organs are pulled out and its skin is mechanically torn away from its body by chains. The prime cuts are separated from the rest, and the rest is fed into a meat grinder, pressed into paddies that are flash frozen, shipped to restaurants across the country, and wolfed down by a cross section of Americans.
This is the literal machinery of the fast food industry, the conveyor belts and bolt guns and grinders and rotating blades, and it is revealed to queasy effect in the climactic scene of Richard Linklater’s film Fast Food Nation. The scene is gross and disturbing, but by no means is it the most disturbing thing in the movie. Fast Food Nation’s real accomplishment is laying bear the machinery of American corporate capitalism that grinds up people as surely as it does cows. People like the illegal immigrants who literally risk life and limb to butcher cattle at the meatpacking plants, the underpaid teens who man this great nation’s fry-o-lators, the customers blithely shoveling poison down their throats; it’s a machine that has nothing to do with burgers and everything to do with extracting maximum profit from every living thing on the planet. This machine’s effects are everywhere: from the fetid shit lakes of factory farm run-off to the sterile miles of homogenized suburban real estate where big box retailers and chain restaurants reproduce at a frenzied rate. Fast food is only a small cog in the mighty engine of profit, but the complete and irredeemable venality of the industry makes it symbolically poignant: the system is inhumane to the animals it slaughters, it fills rivers and lakes with raw animal sewage, it exploits and endangers workers, it turns the lived environment into a joyless procession of identical, florescent-lit nightmares of Formica, and the final product, the point of all this, is a so-called food that leaves its consumers fat, sick and malnourished. The only thing of value produced by this system is corporate profit. Except for shareholders, there are no winners in this industry. It’s that logic, the supremacy of profit over any human considerations, that fuels the machine.
Linklater’s film is an extended critique of capitalism, showing at every turn where individual agency is undermined by the expediencies of the market. Illegal immigrants, student radicals, even top level executives at the fast food companies themselves are essentially powerless to successfully stop or even slow the workings of the machine. The film’s diagnosis is sobering: the logic of capitalism is so deeply internalized, invisibly governs so many of our day to day decisions, that we are basically slaves to it. Our degree of personal autonomy varies depending upon the rung we occupy on the economic ladder, but as individuals we are all destined to live in the same rationalized, mechanized universe. This sense of futility is best symbolized in a scene of young environmentalists cutting through fences in an attempt to liberate future burgers from captivity. The cows don’t move.
Fast Food Nation was released with little fanfare and little commercial or critical notice last year, and that makes sense: it’s not only a bracing indictment of capitalism, it’s a basically hopeless one. The film’s failure is a shame, because the world it paints for its audience is a reflection of the gray assembly line world we inhabit, and the film provides a prism through which to view two other 2006 releases, Half Nelson and Children of Men. Both of these films seem to be reacting to the hopelessness of Fast Food Nation and the questions it raises.
Berkley Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio made a moving speech about the necessity of resistance to the machinery of war and capitalism in 1969. He said “There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" High school history teacher Ryan Gosling shows his inner city students a clip of this quote about halfway through the film Half Nelson and, afterwards, asks them what Savio means by “the machine.” He’s trying to get the students to being the process of questioning and resisting authority. It doesn’t take long in this Socratic dialogue for one of Gosling’s students to point out that, as a white, male representative of the public school system and, by extension, the government, Gosling himself is part of the machine. With a smile, he reminds the students that, since they’re in the school, they’re part of the machine, too.
So the teacher wants to inspire his charges to the necessity of struggle against corrupt authority…except that he is one of the signal representatives of authority in their lives, and he only gets to teach them at all because of the coercive power of the state. It’s enough to make a motherfucker start smoking some crack. And so, Gosling does some a whole bunch of crack in Half Nelson, and while the galaxy of demons that drive him to do this are not fully explained, chief among them is the daily, gut-churning frustration of wanting to lay himself against the gears of a system that has no machinery, that ticks away serenely inside the mind of every person in the country, including those most committed to its destruction. The machine that Richard Linklater deconstructs in Fast Food Nation is the same one that drives Ryan Gosling into despairing drug use in Half Nelson, which ends with a marked sense of ambiguity, the question left hanging: ‘what’s going to become of this guy? ‘ Will he flame out in a blaze of self destruction, will he eventually make peace with the acts of personal good that he can accomplish in life, or, worst of all, will be stop caring completely and content himself with getting on to get along.
When the audience is introduced to Theo Faron, the character played by Clive Owen in Children of Men, he has opted for door number three: slouching through a life of cheap cynicism and bureaucratic drudgery after giving up his youthful activism. He has glimpsed the mighty power of the invisible machine and resigned himself to the petty pleasures of the day-to-day. In effect, his relationship to the system is identical to that of the vast majority of Americans (myself included). Alfonso Cuaron’s film takes a science fiction trope, it’s set in the year 2027, eighteen years after the last baby was born, to illustrate the extent to which we in the first world are able to numb ourselves to the brutalities and injustices of the machine. The fast-motion social destabilization caused by the immanent extinction of the human race has brought the “conquest abroad and repression at home” that anthropologist Stanley Diamond once said characterize civilization out of the shadows and into the daylight of a first world capital. Many of us who despair of the present system comfort ourselves with the thought that widespread complacency with capital and imperial exploitation arise from ignorance (“If only people knew what was going on!”) Children of Men disrupts that notion by showing us a character, Theo, who fought in the street against the authorities in the pre-crisis era, and who now strolls blithely through train stations lined with cages filled with weeping refugees and guarded by German shepherds and gun-toting cops. The commitment to change that drove Theo to struggle with every breath against a system that kept its violence invisible to his class, race and sex, has been demoralized by an endless string of defeats and personal tragedy. Now, he acquiesces to a society where the machinery of oppression is naked and in the streets of London. Theo is, essentially, Ryan Gosling’s character in twenty years or so: dried up and deracinated by the sheer invulnerability of the machine to the will of well intentioned individuals.
What makes Children of Men unique among the 2006 films that dealt with the social and psychological consequences of capitalist machinery is that it is a narrative of resurgent hope, rather than futility. The hope of Children of Men arises from its focus on the human capacity for empathy, and the attendant flowering of conscience. No amount of cynicism or bitter experience of defeat can deter someone motivated by a connection with another human being. And so, you have the main cause of my mini-breakdown upon viewing Children of Men: a creeping suspicion that I am not capable of the sort of boundless humanism that motivates people to rise above the seeming hopelessness of the system to devote themselves to ending it, and a lead-pipe certainty that I would keep living a life of petty day-to-day pleasures. Maybe I should start smoking crack.
